Letter from Boston Women in Physics By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
物理学専攻の女性たち ある日、教授から電子メールを通じて昼食会の誘いを受けた雅子さん。物理学を専攻する女性たちが集まり、お昼を食べながら、女性ならではの関心事について話し合う会です。雅子さんも物理学に携わる女性として、あれこれと思いをめぐらせています。

One day all the women in the physics department (grad students, postdocs and professors) received an enthusiastic e-mail invitation from one of the professors, Rama Bansil, to come to a "BU Women in Physics lunch." Rama held a similar lunch last year too. She has organized various other women's meetings as well, and they have been well-attended and successful.

The food at this year's lunch was not fancy. It consisted of pizza and soda spread out on the desks of one of the classrooms. The discussion at the meeting was also very informal. There were about 20 of us, and we basically used a "round table" format to talk about whatever interested us. There was no particular agenda, and nobody led the discussion. The conversation was allowed to wander into the areas we women found most interesting.

Although last year's discussion centered on the issues of balancing the demands of family life and a competitive physics career, this year finding a job ― period ― seemed to be the most pressing concern. Of course, job hunting is not a particularly gender-specific issue, but women do have special challenges in the working world.

My friend Teiko recently told me that each of the research groups in the chemistry department at her school in Japan have definite caps on the numbers of female students they take. That kind of overt quota would be criticized in an American institution, but even "fair" selection processes can be influenced by subtle, subjective, subliminal factors.

Research positions are particularly scarce now. Women are a definite minority in the physics world, and we haven't established ourselves in the human network of physicists. So it's understandable that we are particularly concerned about our employment prospects.

The BU Physics Department provided the money to buy our pizzas. When I mentioned to my male classmates that we'd just gotten a free lunch, some of them actually got mad. They acknowledged that women in physics "have it hard" compared to men, and they didn't object to us forming our own support group. But they thought it was unfair for the department's common money to be spent for a women-only event.

Actually the entire lunch cost well under one hundred dollars, so I knew the amount wasn't the problem. It was simply that the unfair treatment of women is hard to recognize, while our unfair distribution of the money was open and obvious.

And as my male classmates rightly said, the ugly, the obese, and the unsociable suffer just as much discrimination as women do, and yet they, as a group, don't receive the same kind of free lunch that we did.

There are no black and white answers about who deserves special treatment. The answer depends on who you ask. Popularly accepted answers also change with time. In our mothers' generation, women were excluded from Ivy League colleges. Then a "cutting-edge" affirmative action program in the 1960s forced "exam schools" in Boston to accept one third minority students, but now this law has just been revoked. The times keep changing.

If there were an objective way to measure ugliness, obesity, or unsociability, then perhaps it could be proven that the ugly, obese, or unsociable receive unfair treatment. Then if enough voices were raised for their cause, there might be an annual free lunch for them too. But for now, I think I'll enjoy my free pizza and ponder my own case as a woman in physics.

Shukan ST: Dec. 20, 1996

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